The manufacture of terminal contact locations as used, for example, in integrated circuit technology is a technological process step having product-associated as well as manufacture-conditioned features. For example, it is standard in thin-film head technology to photolithographically generate terminal contacts of copper on a substrate having a plurality of integrated magnetic heads. It is particularly important to fashion the terminal contacts such that, first, the magnetic heads, which are buried under an aluminum oxide protective layer, can be tested after their large-area integration on the substrate and, second, the terminal contacts can be manufactured in a cost-effective way and can be easily bonded.
A method for manufacturing thin-film magnetic heads is possible wherein contact windows are formed in a protective layer of aluminum oxide that is about 50 .mu.m thick with a chemically soluble location holder at the end of the photolithographic process. After the contact windows have been exposed in the protective layer, the exposed contact surface is gold-plated by a cover gold layer which is applied surface-wide to the substrate. Before bonding, the gold cover layer in the region of the exposed gold-plated contact surfaces is again removed and a bonding needle having a bonding wire is subsequently brought into the contact window. Critical disadvantages of the described method lie therein. First, the surface-wide application of the gold coat is uneconomical and, second, the adjustment of the bonding wire in extremely small contact windows is difficult. Adjusting the bonding wire is difficult because the walls of the contact windows are frequently contacted when adjusting and, thus, an increased risk of failure of the thin-film magnetic heads results.